Sector(s)
States Newsroom is a non-profit network of over 25 affiliate sites covering state reporting in America. With headquarters in Washington and multiple local teams totaling over 95 staff, the site provides high-quality, non-partisan state reporting with a progressive editorial approach. In order to maintain their ad-free and impartial reporting standards, their philanthropic business model relies on transparent donations from individuals or grants but not corporations or governments.
About the project
Overview
The site needed to be a user-friendly, responsive umbrella platform for content pulled from over 25 affiliate sites. Using only open source technology, Vardot built State Newsroom a news site with intuitive user experience and search functionality, as well as fully automated categorization and tagging capabilities.
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Key Functionality
- Customized RSS feed module for the real-time importing of bulk content from over 25 affiliate sites
- OpenCalais, a semantic web service that uses Natural Language Processing for advanced categorization and tagging
- Solr Search, a hyper-fast, enterprise-grade search platform
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Intuitive UX/UI
As a news site with over 25 RSS feeds, the user experience was made easy to navigate by simplifying content categorization to be state-specific with just 8 theme categories. Customized RSS feeds, standardized display, advanced tagging, and search web services completed Vardot’s approach to creating a user-centric news site for the State Newsroom team.
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Custom RSS Feed
A custom RSS feed was built to pull all existing and future articles from WordPress into Drupal. Vardot designed news site-specific pages and article layouts to automatically display the original article in a visually appealing and standardized format. To date, over 100,000 articles have been pulled into the news aggregator site.
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Automated Tagging
Working in unison with the RSS feed, web service OpenCalais used Natural Language Processing to scan every article for keywords which were then used to auto-create suitable tagging. These tags were then automatically used to match the article to one of the 8 streamlined categories. Legacy categorization mapping to the new categorization standards was catered for to ensure that older content was optimized for any current searches.
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User Centric Administration
The State Newsroom team was supplied with a fully customized administrator back end that could be easily updated with no technical expertise. Drupal’s Layout Builder with it’s easy-to-use drag and drop functionality, allowed administrators to design pages based on custom templates. Administrators could add to or customize the site and the automated processes through a dashboard that covered permissions, page and article level edits.
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Advanced Search
The other aspect of a great news site user experience is advanced and accurate search capabilities. The Vardot team implemented Solr Search, a super-fast enterprise search platform, to ensure that each article was well written and displayed, tagged, as well as being easily discoverable by relevant site search queries. Site administrators could also hide or display information at the page and categorization level, adding customization levers to the automated processes.
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Advanced Hosting
The site had a large amount of content and data. Using Vardot’s hosting to ensure excellent website load speed and performance was critical to completing the ideal news site user experience.
The Results
With a complimentary selection of advanced open source solutions, States Newsroom is set up with a scalable enterprise-grade news site that can continue their goal of providing high quality state reporting and excellent user experiences.
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Why Drupal was chosen
Vardot enabled States Newsroom to build and launch a new scalable enterprise-grade news site that continues their goal of providing high-quality state reporting and excellent UX.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
